“Okay, bathroom is wet, so we must — Andrew-sensei?” Lieko steps into the room. “Andrew-sensei?” She scowls at the unconscious man sprawled on the living room floor. With a despondent sigh she takes out her phone as she slips into her shoes, closing the genkan door behind her. “Kinomoto-senpai. The new teacher … yes, I brought him but … No, he’s asleep … No, I tried to —”

Lieko closes the front door as her superior continues to berate her on the phone. She leaves the man in the apartment to begin her petulant walk down toward the apartment entrance. She steels herself with a deep inhale and opens the front door. The man from the shrine is still there. Well, perhaps not a shrine of this world, she thinks to herself. But he does don a shrine worker’s uniform and holds a pair of clacking wood blocks in his hands. He is still smiling. “Good afternoon,” he says, each syllable pronounced with slow, sharp consonants.

Lieko glares at him for only a moment before she turns on her heel and heads back toward Zozo. “But Kinomoto-senpai, how can we — Yes, yes, I understand but …” She does not give the man a second glance, nor does she return his salutation. The man giggles behind her back. He does not need binocular vision to see she has given up speaking yumego long ago; she will not speak it now, not to him. But he is a kind creature, and it was worth a shot.

As the woman walks down the long, wide street, the wind picks up. It stirs the baby-pink and white buds on the sakura branches in front of the post office and bank. Their scent mingles with those of French fries and thawing palm trees as the wind blows a little harder, rattling the windows with gentle pulses. The tall, thin woman ignores it all for the sake of concentrating on her superior’s voice, focusing on the reality of her situation: that she is not dreaming, she is not dreaming, she is not dreaming … She continues her journey, unaware that the man she left behind is slipping deeper and deeper into the world of dreams until …

“Gotcha!”